If... by J.B.S.Haldane (1934)

The following essay is from a collection of essays in a book
called 'Science and Life' which can be obtained from
the Rationalist Press Association.

In a scientific paper one can almost gauge the intellectual
honesty of the author by the number of phenomena which
he or she leaves unexplained. The historian, with rare exceptions
, is expected to explain everything. This happened because
King John was a bad man, that because God willed
it, and the other because the feudal system had
developed an internal contradiction. It is
only a great historian who can dare to confess his complete
ignorance.

That eminent Rationalist, the late Professor Bury, devoted a learned and
fascinating book to the collapse of
the Roman Empire about AD 400. He raised the question of why the
Western Empire fell when the Eastern survived, and after a very close
analysis he put it down to bad luck - in other words,
to causes outside the sphere of the historian. If at the
critical moment Rome had produced a military leader, it would not have been
compelled to rely on Stilicho the Goth, and Alaric might have been
repulsed from Rome as he was from Constantinople.

This sort of history is encouraging to the lover of speculation like myself.
If individuals count, if Cleopatra's nose and Elizabeth's sexual abnormality
really diverted the course of history, then we may legitimately
rewrite it as it might have been.

And just because the details of religion depend so much on the
ideas of individuals, even if its general lines are determined by
economic and social conditions, religious history should be
particularly easy to rewrite in this way. So it is not unprofitable
to consider what would have happened if , instead of being murdered
in his tent, Aurelian had reigned for as many years as Constantine,
and founded a dynasty devoted to the worship of the Unconquered Sun.

We must allow for modifications of Mithraism similar to those which
occurred in primitive Christianity, and try to put ourselves
in the place of a liberal Churchman of today - worried, but not
overwhelmed , by the advance of science, and eager to make
the best of both worlds.

Here is what, but for the dagger of Mucapor, we might today be reading, or hearing
on the radio:

Mithraism and its Critics

Twenty, nay even ten, years ago the intellectual basis of our faith
seemed insecure to many honest thinkers. Old Testament critics had carried
with them a large body of opinion, even among the clergy, in favour of the theory that
the books usually attributed to Zoroaster contained many later
interpolations. And the evidence that even the New Testament writings had not always
come down to us in their completely written form had
shaken the faith of many. But these things did not touch the core of our
religion. The writings of Drews in Germany and Robertson in England,
which actually cast doubt upon the historicity of Mithras, were
a more serious matter. Fortunately this preposterous theory has
been completely discredited by such works as the Bishop
of Cambridge's Mithras the Man , just as the recent
excavations in Persia have done so much to verify the
miraculous element in Zoroaster's writings.

But it was the advance of science, rather than the criticism of
Scripture, which had done most to shake the
faith of those who did not realize that there can be no
contradiction between science and religion.

For every advance of science has served to confirm the truths handed down
to us by our Lord and his Apostles. To take a well-known example,
every child asks its mother: 'Why does the Sun let the clouds
hide His Face?', and one of the dualistic heresies of the primitive
Church was, of course, based on the idea that the clouds represented
an evil power hostile to the Sun. Thanks to science, we know today that
the Sun Himself draws them up from the ocean by His own power.

The Church of England is based on science, as embodied
in the Copernican Reformation. The discovery that
the Sun is the centre of our system gives us a far truer idea of
His greatness than the Ptolemaic system still taught by the
Roman Church. And the Anglican Church has always welcomed the
advance of science, provided that it was true science and not
idle speculation

Rationalists (so-called) have regarded the execution of Bruno as as a blot
on our Church, and have claimed him as a martyr of science because
he regarded the fixed stars as suns. They forget that Bruno conceived these bodies
as each surrounded by planets like the earth - a doctrine clearly
destructive of true religion. His execution was not , of course,
in keeping with modern views; however, he was a martyr not of
science but of error.

Now, when the sizes of the fixed stars were ascertained and their spectra
observed, it became clear that in certain respects they did resemble the Sun.
For many this seemed the beginning of the end. The champions of religion
were not always discreet. We must admit that in Norman Lockyer's
famous encounter with the Professor of
Dogmatic Heliology at the British Association's meeting at Oxford
the Professor had the worst of it.

Yet main of faith went on in the quiet certainty that with the further progress of knowledge
the wise old heliologians would be vindicated. And it was so.
We already know that the vast majority of these so-called suns
are utterly unfitted to be luminaries
surrounded by planets with living, let alone rational, inhabitants.
Some are too hot, others too cold. Many are double, many more are
variable.

A hundred years of careful search has not produced
a tittle of evidence that any planetary system save our own exists.
The beautiful researches of Sir Jacob Janes,
popularised in The Intelligible Universe , have shown that another
such system could have come into being only by a miracle.
And a Rationalism which can defend itself only by postulating
miracles is not a very redoubtable foe.

It may very well be that many of the fixed stars resemble
the Sun as a statue, or even a corpse, resembles a man . But they
are not the fathers of living systems, and they are not themselves
alive. It is one of the most elementary facts of
religious experience that the Sun is full of an intense life,
and no one who opens his eyes without bias on a bright
summer's day can well escape awareness of it. No fact
of religion has been more abundantly confirmed by science than that the
Sun is 'the Lord and Giver of Life'. Not only has a study
of photosynthesis shown that the energy for the lives of plants
and animals is all derived form the Sun but opinion
is becoming stronger and stronger that life on
our earth originated in organic matter formed by solar
radiation in the primitive
atmosphere. Finally, every year makes it more
probable that our whole earth is only a detached fragment
of His body. Zoroaster has been fully vindicated.

The fantastic cosmogony of Laplace, according to which the
Sun and His planets were evolved out of a spinning nebula,
has gone the way of other such follies. A little elementary
philosophy would have shown its deluded adherents that order
cannot arise out of chaos. But during the
late nineteenth century certain oriental religions
became temporarily fashionable in 'advanced' circles. Hinduism,
disguised as Theosophy, obtained a certain hold.

Still more fantastic was the attempt to bring Christianity into
Europe. This religion had a certain vogue among the poorer
classes of the Roman Empire in the first centuries of our
era, but vanished, with other dark things, before the
rising Sun of Mithraism. Its extraordinary doctrine that the material
world had an immaterial creator, who yet begot a material son, could
have appealed only to lovers of paradox, and its moral consequences are
sufficiently demonstrated by the fact that it is the official
religion of Abyssinia, the only State where not merely slavery
but slave-raiding is still in vogue.

True religion can be built only on the
impregnable rock of Mithraism, and we need not be surprised that one of the
most daring of recent attacks on the divinity of the Sun is to be found,
thinly veiled under a cloud of
mathematical formulae in The Internal Constitution of the Stars
, by the well-known idealist Professor Addington.
Throughout
the tacit assumption, based on a probably fortuitous numerical
agreement, is made that the Sun is only a star. And a star,
according to this author, is a mere ball of gas, a chaos of
atoms and electrons flying at random.

Not for the first time the learning of Oxford has
overthrown the speculation of Cambridge. There are many who feel that
any attempt to probe the internal constitution of the Sun, even in
a spirit of the deepest reverence, has a flavour of
blasphemy. We cannot share this view. Religion, we repeat,
has nothing to fear from science. So firmly is this principle
established by history that we can afford to neglect
pronouncements contrary to religion, made in the name of science,
in the certainty that further research will disprove them. Professor
Mill of Oxford re-examined Addington's assumption. The Sun, it now seems, has
a gaseous envelope, but a core of incredible density,
in which the matter is organised in a manner to which
our earthly experience furnishes no analogy.

Here, and not in the solar atmosphere, we find the material
conditions for a Divine Life; and here, by processes beyond
the reach of human understanding, is generated the energy which we
later see as Light.

If the Sun's atmosphere is gaseous, His core is eminently solid and
material. And the same is true of Light. The hideous hypothesis of
Young and Fresnel reduced the Holy Light Itself to vibrations
in an hypothetical ether. No more than the particle theory of
Newton could it be reconciled with the truths of religion. After being
bandied about for a century by scientific dogmatists the wave
theory is now being withdrawn with as little noise as possible.

Light has properties like those of waves, others like those of
particles; and matter also has properties of both kinds. By faith, we
have accepted the doctrine that the Sun, Mithras, and the Holy Light
are one. In every century there have been scoffers who asked how this
was possible. In the nineteenth century, with the progress of astronomy
and physics, the number of the scoffers increased. 'The Sun,' they said, '
consists of atoms, His Light of vibrations - how can they be one?'
Today, if still only incompletely, we see how.

Just as the Solar Life is not, and could not be, divorced
from matter, human life in inseparably bound up with matter of a
different kind. Heretical sects have continually
toyed with the idea of an immaterial spirit, and during
the nineteenth century several eminent scientists
had adopted this theory. Their numbers are diminishing, and
Sir Oliphant Lodge, who , till recently at any rate, was
a champion of the undulatory theory of Light, is perhaps their
last survivor. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that our
creeds teach the resurrection of the body by the same Solar
power which causes the germination of seeds in the spring.
They contain no reference to an immaterial soul.

Such is the position today. There is not one of the central doctrines
of our faith that has not been completely confirmed by science.
It is a question whether we should not give this fact a practical
application. A constant flood of anti-religious teaching is poured
out upon our youth in the name of science. Has not the time
come when this poisonous propaganda should be taken in hand?
We do not wish to discourage honest investigation, even of the most
basal doctrines of our religion. We must protest, however, when the
half-baked theories of the lecture room are given to the
world as firmly established truths.

The theory that the resemblance
between the Sun and the stars is more than superficial is
hinted at in many school text-books. The time is come when such books
should be withdrawn. Thank the Sun, ours is still at bottom a
Mithraistic country, and public opinion is ripe for recognition
that , in its own interests, science should be protected against
the dissemination of such errors in its name.

***************

And so on. We may be quite sure that this sort of stuff would find a
very wide audience, in spite of the fact that, according to all the
evidence, the Sun is a rather ordinary star, with no more claim to
be alive than has a kettle.

Once can always find certain details of a religious myth or doctrine
which are supported by contemporary discovery. The flood
seems to have been a historical event. It is true that
it did not drown everyone in Mesopotamia, let alone all mankind,
except one family. But any widespread flood was good
enough for Christian apologists. The walls of Jericho had fallen
down (at least in some places). So they must have been brought
down by Joshua's ram's horn band.

Our present astronomical equations do not work for more than
about 2,000 million years back. So the universe must have been created
at about that date. We cannot yet predict rainstorms as accurately as
eclipses. So it is legitimate to pray for rain, though superstitious
to hang the crockery when the sun is eclipsed.
But all these amusing details are negligible compared with
the solid fact that centuries of science have produced no
evidence for Divine intervention in the order of nature, or
the existence of a soul detachable from the human body.

Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge
which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls
and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The
scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the
more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their
proper sphere, and they should realize that they are allies.